P2: Where Are We?

Resources:

We are all aware of the current chaos in our society, but we tend to focus on the cause of this chaos as the changes that have occurred recently, rather than seeing those recent changes as the product of long-standing large-scale ongoing change.

If we don’t grasp the large-scale context of what we face now, we will make strategic errors in our rights and freedom campaigns. These errors will reinforce the failure of the very things we are trying to transform.

As Gregory Bateson claimed, the possibilities of choice in the near future hinge on us understanding the full range of affordances (opportunities for action) in the environment of where we are right now. We must not leap to premature action.

We don’t see those affordances very well because we tend to use what we are afraid of as a filter, eliminating the vast majority of what we might do before we consider the possibilities for changing our future. This filtering effectively leads us to fall back on old habits of fearful response.

This is true of individuals, families, groups, organizations and larger social entities. Our human instinct to herd reinforces our use of those filters resulting in a narrowing of our dreams for the future.